As you may know, all our sites have been hosted at a computer, nicknamed 'Icetex', located at Mastermind's dorm, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, since the end of 2004. During these 2 and a half years, Mastermind has spent countless hours personally maintaining the server to ensure the safety of our sites, as well as their availability. We have also been using free bandwidth kindly provided by MIT. With Icetex, and the help of everyone, Revora became an entertaining place, full of creative sites, projects, mods and even games.
However, a few days ago we were informed that Mastermind has got an intership in the other side of the country, and that he will leave MIT before May the 28th, 2007.
This means that we will be moving to a dedicated server within the next weeks. This new server should have more powerful hardware than Icetex, however, it will introduce two problems for us - Bandwidth limits and high monthly costs.
Bandwidth is very expensive in the market. The basic plan for our server will give us 2000 Gigabytes, with a small fee for each additional GB used. Considering that we are yet to reach this limit, it would not be a problem in the first months of server usage. The second problem, the cost, is a more serious one. With a server in MM's room, we only paid the cPanel license, which cost approximately $400 each year. The use of this new server will now cost us $225 per month, and, unfortunately, it is not a friendly value for a group of university students, most of which have no jobs, and what we gain with advertisements is not enough to cover half of these costs and other costs from any additional hardware in the future and domain renewals.
For all these years, Revora has provided free hosting for creative projects, in order to provide a friendly environment where people can discuss, practice, and learn a big variety of skills, from gaming design, art, programming, as well as a nice place to know people and discuss everything from international politics to mindless spam. We would like to reiterate that our objectives stay untouched, as well as the free hosting for all of those who are part of this great community. The costs above will be paid with donations, advertisements and possibly a paid hosting plan for those who are not part of Revora community and forums.
While most of these ideas are still under discussion, we would like to announce the following hosting changes, active once the new server comes live:
- All hostees will receive cPanel access, and will be able to create emails, access site statistics, create databases, etc., without the need of a division administrator, and independently if they have a domain or a subdomain.
- Despite the bandwidth limit announced above, we will not really meter the bandwidth or webspace used, however, in order to know where the server resources are being used more often, we shall put limits. As your site gets closer to these limits, you will be e-mailed. Contact us to have your limits expanded with no costs. These expansions will always be free, however, sites that uses a lot of resources will be invited to use Google Advertisements, which will help us to pay the server costs.
- So far, our hosting policy did not allow for hostees having project forums outside Revora, unless with proper Revora authorization. Now, we will not have problems with external forums, however, if your project has one, even if it is in Invision Free, you will be moved to a paid hosting plan.
So far, the way Google Advertisements work is subject to changes, since it is still under discussion. Paid hosting is also under discussion and we shall announce further details as they become available.
If you have a site that does not use Revora forums, or has external forums and you have not yet been contacted, please contact us immediately.
Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, and we hope this transition to the new server be as smooth as possible.
Kind Regards,
The Revora Team